B007RT1UH4 EBOK (91 page)

To Ólafur Gunnarsson

Piermont, NY 10968

3 April 1978

Dear Olafur,

I enjoyed reading the pages from your new book, many thanks for sending them. It confirms what you said about
J R
not being uniquely American: I guess it is the same everywhere, people stuffing their bellies and their pockets, every man for himself. I wish the market for good fiction were better here, but it seems simply to be going the opposite direction, very much affected by television I’m afraid which is not a ‘communication’ medium but an advertising medium and as such aimed at the lowest common denominator in the consumer audience. I don’t know what the answer is, but that writing what one thinks is worth writing is a rough way to try to make a living.

best regards and good luck,

William Gaddis

To John and Pauline Napper

Piermont NY 10968

10 April 1978

Dear John and Pauline.

Well! I had a call from Sarah from Boston yesterday, she had just got back & could not say enough for you both, your friends, England, castles—all seems to have been one of the best experiences of her entire life to now & it all pleases me more really than anything I can think of: essentially that she does have this effervescence, this capacity of excitement for life which your hospitality kindled to its height, & at my parental remove I am eternally grateful goes without saying.

Otherwise . . . well, otherwise. Your generous concern & thoughts for me & the cottage there (all which Sarah reviewed in rapturous terms) as the likeliest place to start, though this will not be a review of emotional agonies: as you know, there is nothing like financial collapse to mitigate dental, marital, even renal (associated with lower back pains) difficulties. Not collapse really but massive readjustment, problem that that takes time & in the US as nowhere time is money (ie interest). The essential readjustment being the realization that abruptly & all at once—as I may even have written you before—the coalescence of Judith gone, Sarah married, & Matthew well on his own way, it looks for the first time in my adult life that I’m not directly responsible for, or to anyone. [...]

Point is I’ve got rid of most of the despair & am now just desperate: you understand the distinction. Finally beyond the angers, resentments, jealousies &c involved with Judith’s departure, beyond either wanting her back or not wanting her back & finally just concerned for her wellbeing with or without me; also finally able to grasp that what she is trying to do does take a good deal of courage & I know she is having a difficult time both for work & supporting herself, & loneliness, & coming to terms with the real consequences of her move.

The ‘desperate’, in sum, meaning the purely practical: debt, work, what to do about the Fire Island house, thoughts of renting out this Piermont house for a while &c & the ‘work’ being at the heart of things & most problematical. I suppose it has a lot to do with creative lag, the attempt to rekindle one’s fires after the dampened blaze of
J R
but I’ve simply not yet got any grasp of a central idea for another book of the obsessive proportions that kept both other books going & made all other considerations secondary. In large part of course it’s that all those considerations—Judith, wedding, debt, unrealized expectations for work—have crowded to the front for this past year & I can’t really think clearly enough to sit down to the selfish occupation of writing until they are fairly resolved, one or another of them occupying every waking moment. (The paradox, the essential absurdity being of course that the most pressing of them, debt, could be resolved if I simply would sit down & really get another novel going. But perhaps you can understand it is not simply a matter of volition.)

In other words, & to get back to your cottage where all this took off from, it would be the ideal if 1) I had a project in hand with a life of its own begun; & 2) if I had resolved these practical issues of debt, rentals, furniture &c &c. The one ‘real’ item on the horizon is a week in late June I will go to California myself for one of these writing ‘workshops’, not something I at all want to do but the $1500 ‘honorarium’ is not to be gainsaid, God knows, also the brief enough change of vista. And again, even though Judith has encouraged me to feel free, do anything & anywhere I wish, it is terribly difficult still to break a 10-year habit of feeling responsible for someone especially feeling that things are not going very well for her. I know that my deciding the divorce step hit her quite hard but after her having been away a full year, & then wanting only a property settlement & indefinite separation agreement, moving directly toward divorce seemed to me the only way to bring to her the reality of what she was doing.

Still I know, as reflected in your thoughtful & sensible letter of a year or so ago John, that it is something she feels she has to do in order to discover & grasp who she is; there is certainly no rancour from her side for me, quite the other way in fact; but while the thought of her becoming a casualty of our life & times is almost unbearable, it becomes at last a case of (Heraclitus?)’ ‘To see clearly & be able to do nothing’; & the reality seems to be in the effort not to let this spill over & paralyse the areas where one can do something, the mundane, quite un-unique world of work, property, rentals & mortgages & taxes & debt.

And so if I could grasp a little more realistically what I have just written here, I would be a little further on the way to resolving things that can be resolved & which only I can resolve. That at any rate is the direction I am trying. [...]

love & best wishes again,

Willie

Heraclitus [...] do nothing: pre-Socratic Greek philosopher (c. 535–c. 475
BCE
); his observation is one of Jack Gibbs’s handwritten quotations on p. 486 of
J R
.

To David Markson

Piermont

17 April 1978

Dear David.

Thanks for having your
Lowry
sent to me, I can’t say I’ve read it or even will in the immediate future because obviously I’ve got to sit down & face the long postponed reading of Lowry’s book itself first. (From a glance though, if representative your approach to investigations by others (p. 216 §3) seems to me exemplary.) Anyhow Times Books does appear to have given you the attractive format & jacket that makes it look like it will be around for a while. Which is all we can ever ask (the rest being, as Eliot remarks, ‘not our business’).

good luck with it,

W. Gaddis

your
Lowry
:
Malcolm Lowry’s Volcano: Myth, Symbol, Meaning
(Times Books, 1978).

p. 216: perhaps WG means the remark: “no individual commentator is ever going to produce a ‘definitive’ explication of
Under the Volcano
because the depths and echoes in the book would appear almost infinite.”

‘not our business’: from “East Coker,” part 5.

To Johan Thielemans

Piermont, N.Y. 10968

18 April 1978

Dear Johan Thielemans.

Thanks for your letter & for sending me your piece from
TREMA
. All your point of entropy is certainly well taken & I wonder if you have ever read Norbert Wiener’s book
The Human Use of Human Beings
(viz ‘. . . it is possible to interpret the information carried by a message as essentially the negative of its entropy, and the negative logarithm of its probability. That is, the more probable the message, the less information it gives . . . &c’). Obviously a book that ‘reached me.’

But I must confess what pleased me most was your taking John Gardner to task, his review of
J R
was I think the only one that thoroughly irritated me, following its smug opening pronouncement on how easy the book was to read with error after error on the text, making clear that perhaps the book is a bit difficult to read for someone with his sloppy approach piling up on one of his lofty pronunciamentos (though I think his yappings about Art are not taken terribly seriously here—which of course makes him yap louder—& that people are getting rather weary of hearing it: see attached clipping). You did at any rate nail it down neatly.

I am only now trying to get in the frame of mind to start another book, meanwhile a possibility that
J R
may be made into a film, which I frankly see rather less in terms of artistic than financial deliverance, might eventually even enable me to get to Europe again after these many years.

with best regards

William Gaddis

TREMA
: “Gaddis and the Novel of Entropy,”
TREMA
[Travaux et Recherches sur le Monde Anglophone] 2 (1977): 97–107.

Wiener’s book: first published in 1950; WG quotes from the first chapter.

attached clipping: probably a negative review of Gardner’s book
On Moral Fiction
, which appeared in 1978.